So you want to export the individual instruments played in Superior Drummer as audio files? Easy! Here’s a step by step way to do it. For this tutorial, I’ll be using Cubase 5.

First, create a new empty project in Cubase, and after it opens, click on Devices/VST instruments, and select Superior Drummer:

Note that I’m not using the usual function of adding a VST instrument track; this is important. If you add a normal VST instrument track, you won’t be able to use SD’s multiple outs. Make sure to use this method.

When you add the instrument, Cubase will ask you if you want to create a MIDI track assigned to Superior Drummer – go ahead and click Create.

Now, in Superior drummer, click on the MIXER button, and in the mixer window, in the OUTPUT row, click the orange text which reads “Out ½” – the menu that appears will have many options; we want to select “Multichannel“.

Now, go back to your VST instruments panel in Cubase, and in the row for Superior Drummer, you’ll see a button next to the E button which is used to open the mixer window for the VST instrument. This is the outputs button. Click on it, and click “Activate All Outputs“:

Now that you’ve done that, look at your Cubase project window; you’ll notice that you’ve got multiple channels – one for each of the outputs in Superior Drummer:

Now, go back into Superior Drummer, and open your MIDI Grooves, and browse to the one of your choice:

Now, drag this MIDI groove onto the MIDI track that Cubase created for you at the beginning of this project, and the MIDI will appear in your project window pane. Click on the MIDI clip to select it, and then right click it; in the menu that pops up, select Transport/Locators To Selection:

Now, hit play on the Cubase transport. You’ll see that each of the tracks (as long as there’s an instrument playing on it) will be showing output:

It’s a good idea at this time to name those tracks to match those in Superior Drummer:

Now, let’s say we want to export the Kick to an audio wave file, so we can use it in other productions, or effect it with audio effects. Simple! Solo the Channel assigned to the kick drum:

If you’re playing back audio, you should only hear that kick drum now.

Now, click on File/Export/Audio Mixdown:

In the window that appears, name your track, select where to save it, and under the “Import into Project” heading, select “Audio Track“. This will create a new audio track with that Kick drum wave file on it; you can also import it into your Pool, if you wish.

When you’re done, hit “Export“, and exit the audio exporter when you’re done. When you go back into the project pane, you’ll see that you’ve got a brand new Wave file on a new audio track; this is your Kick drum!

You can repeat this process for all of the drums you wish to export and use as audio files, and then do with them what you wish!

I hope you found this useful. Happy drumming!

-Brian

Getting EZplayer pro set up in Ableton Live can be confusing at first, so I thought I’d write up a tutorial with some images.

For this tutorial I’ll be using Ableton 7.0.16.

First, open up Ableton, and open your plugins dialog. Scroll down to EZplayer and drag it into the device creation section, or create a new MIDI track to put it on.

Next, do the same for your Toontrack Plugin of choice, in this case, EZdrummer:

Now, we’ll set up the MIDI routing to tell EZdrummer to take its MIDI input from EZplayer Pro. Click on the pulldown under “MIDI from” select “EZplayer”.

Now do the same for the pulldown under “MIDI FROM“, selecting “EZplayer” from the pulldown. Finally, record enable this track.

Now jump back to the channel that you’ve got EZplayer Pro on. Open the EZplayer interface, and select the drummer you want to use from the pulldown next to the Velocity knob. I’ll select “EZdrummer” from the Toontrack menu:

Now I need to tell EZplayer what channel its going to send MIDI information to. Click the same pulldown you just used to select your drummer, and navigate to the MIDI output menu – select the channel you have EZdrummer on, in this case, channel 3:

Next, select a MIDI groove from your library of grooves and loops. You can drag some of them into EZplayer’s interface from here, or you can audition them using the quick audition player.

Finally, hit play in EZplayer; you’ll notice that EZdrummer is playing back the selected MIDI groove:

That’s it! I’ve included an Ableton Live set for quick reference or you can build this set yourself and save it as a template.

Happy drumming!

-Brian

by G.W. Childs IV

Every music application has some way of color coding regions, clips, tracks, etc. However, isn’t it interesting how you don’t see anyone using them, with exception of people, like myself, who create demos for music software?

Let me be the first to say that colors are not a silly thing to add to your tracks. It’s not childish, and it’s not meant to make things prettier. Color coding a clip, region, etc, can really help you quickly identify parts, which makes editing and arranging much easier.

For example: I can decide that any part colored red is a rhythm part. As I go back through my song, I can clearly see all of my rhythm parts and differentiate those parts from the green guitar parts.

Second example: I can color code all of the clips or regions green that are apart of my song intro, the chorus could be blue, the verse could be yellow. When I go back to edit my song, I can clearly see all of the parts that make up my song and can jump around accordingly.

Finally, one of my favorite things about the color feature is one of the most simple: Colors can mean whatever you want them to. You can set up a color coding system for the way that your brain works.

However, I wouldn’t get too complicated, occasionally, you may want to pass a song along to a friend to do some work on and if you can easily explain what the color coding means, he can follow your system and this helps the collaboration go even more smoothly. When he returns the song to you with his revisions, you’ll be able to clearly hear and ’see’ what he’s done.

Setting up the MC Control and MC Mix in Ableton Live is a relatively easy process, but there are a few things you can do to make it easy on yourself, so let’s talk about setting up these great pieces of gear on Ableton Live.

For this Tutorial, I’ll be using Ableton Live 8.0.9.

Firstly, make sure you’ve followed the instructions for setting up your Euphonix controllers in your studio, and that you’ve installed the the EUcontrol software on your Mac. You’ll know everything is set up and running when you see the Green EUcontrol logo in your Mac’s Taskbar:

Now, click the Apple menu, and open system preferences:

Click the Euphonix logo found in this pane to open the Euphonix preference pane.

Next, locate the Ableton Live application in your finder, and drag it into the Euphonix Preference pane:

Now, you want to select “Mackiecontrol” from the protocol section. This tells the EUcontrol software that you will use Mackiecontrol to control Ableton’s features.

Now, you want to make sure that all of your Euphonix controllers are setup in the “my surfaces” section of the EUcontrol settings pane. Select the green icon in your Mac taskbar, and click “EUcontrol settings“. In the pane you’re presented with, click each control surface you wish to use in Ableton, and click the “add” button. This will add the surface to the “My surfaces” section, and they’ll be ready to control Ableton.

Now, launch Ableton, and open the Preferences control panel by clicking the Live menu and then selecting Preferences.

Click the MIDI SYNC section. In this section, select “Mackiecontrol” from under the “Control Surface” column’s pulldown menu. In the Input column, select “Euphonix MIDI (Euphonix Port 1)”, and do the same for the output column, and then, under the “MIDI Ports” Column, select “ON” under the TRACK column. The SYNC and REMOTE controls need not be turned on.

You’re almost done. The MC Mix will now control volume and other features in your Live Set, and The MC Control will control Play/Stop/Record at this time, but you won’t be able to use the Jog wheel and faders. To do that, select “Mackiecontrol” from row 2 in the Control surface section in Ableton, and then select “Euphonix MIDI (Euphonix Port 2)” for the input and output sections.:

You’ll see the faders on your Euphonix hardware jump around a little bit. Finally, Select “ON” from under the second Mackiecontrol input listing under the “MIDI PORTS” column, as you did for Port 1.

You’re done! You can now use all your faders and controls to control Ableton. Have fun!

FM – 10-31-09 Happy Halloween!

My - insert Sampler Based plug-in here (Superior Drummer, Groove Agent, etc) - is causing my DAW to

• crash
  
• take 20 minutes to load
  
• Freeze the system
  
• makes the system sluggish or all of the above when opening the session….
  

Or as I’ll put it: “What exactly is happening with RAM in these larger sessions?”

First, before getting hot under that collar, try a little experiment.  Start a NEW session in your DAW, one that doesn’t have any tracks and isn’t coming from any templates.  Now create an instrument track and instance the ‘problem’ plug-in.  Chances are it loads just fine and now works.  So what is going on?  In a nutshell, you’re session is requiring either more RAM than your system has to offer, or is requiring more RAM than the application can allocate…. huh?

It’s like this…

Currently the most RAM an application ON A MAC can allocate is about 4.5 GB of RAM.   If your system has 4 GB or less of RAM to begin with, then you’ll be hitting that ceiling sooner which is obvious.  What isn’t obvious is that for folks who have 6 or more GB of RAM installed your DAW still can only access a maximum of about 4.5 GB of RAM. So every sampler instrument, Drum kit, orchestral library etc you insert in a session is going to take a small piece of the RAM pie until there is no more and then you’ll get the (read opening sentence)

Well that Sux.

Yes it does, but it’s not a new problem. It’s been with us all along and trust me when I say that today, these limitations seem almost minimal compared to where the technology has come from.  What is new however is the A) every computer can now accept a lot more than 4 BG of RAM, and B) the amount of brand new users who have never used a DAW, never used a Sampler, have never been exposed to the inherent limitations of these systems and have been sold a wonderful “yes you can it’s so easy” dream. Which means when reality hits it’s a shocker for most who really have no idea what’s happening ‘under the hood’

Yes Fine, but what can I do?

Someday in the not very far off future applications will become 64bit. What that basically means, in context of this Blog, is that the limitations of memory access are lifted. Native Instruments for example just released a 64 bit version of Kontakt 3.5 which is 64 bit.  Load as much into it as you have RAM for.  But in the meantime, you’ll need to keep an eye on your overhead.  Don’t load 6 instances of EZDrummer, Don’t load the Acoustic Grand Piano into your templates if you don’t play it. In the case of VSL, they created an application that loads the Vienna library into a second application in the background. This means you get 4.5 GB of RAM just for the orchestra library, and still get to keep 4.5 GB of Ram for whatever DAW you are running.  As long as you’ve got 10 or more GB of RAM to begin with it’s a great solution.

As a final caveat, keep in mind that the 4.5 GB limit I mention here does vary from DAW to DAW, It simply a maximum potential and does not necessarily mean 4.5 GB worth of samples. The DAW itself is taking up RAM and that will vary and some applications may max out at a maximum allocation of 4 or less.

It can be so complicated can’t it?

I wish to mix my tracks live into 4 parts- bass, drums, keys and odds & ends and have them running concurrently on 4 Audio tracks live .

We would call these “STEMS” or “GROUPS. Are these “stems” recorded to their OWN tracks or do you want to be able to mix them into “GROUPS” Live?… So that you could make adjustments WITHIN the “groups” or “stems”? IE: All drums would be coming out of a “STEREO PAIR” but, you may want to be able to raise or lower the snare live… For this tutorial I will assume that all your tracks are separate…

I need to learn how to send these out of Cubase 4.5.2…

You will need to create GROUP tracks in Cubase…

PROJECT>ADD TRACK>GROUP CHANNEL…

In the OPTIONS box that appears, choose to create 4 and make them STEREO.

You will now have 4 STEREO GROUP CHANNELS.

NAME each one just like you name an AUDIO TRACK . IE: DRUMS / BASS / KEYS / ODDS&ENDS.

In the MIXER you can now select an output destination for each instrument…

So… You can now set the OUTPUT of each audio track to the appropriate GROUP…

IE: Kick – to DRUMS / Snare – to Drums, Hat – To DRUMS, etc…

Once you have completed the routing, you will have 4 FADERS (The GROUP tracks) that “contain”your different “groups” or “stems” of instruments.IE: 1 fader controls the volume of ALL drums, another fader controls ALL Keysboards, etc. NOTE: They will appear at the extreme RIGHT of the Mixer.

…to an M-Audio Firewire 410 interface , and then route these 4 audio tracks into the mixing desk that I will have on stage.

The FireWire 410 has 8 Line outputs on the back so, you can use these “line outs” in pairs…

IE; 1+2 = Drums / 3+4 = Bass / 5+6 = Keys / 7+8 = Odd & Ends… You would then just connect these

physical output “pairs” to your mixer… Just make sure that the pairs of faders on your mixer are

panned HARD LEFT & RIGHT to maintain the stereo imaging (if there is any).

To ROUTE the AUDIO that is coming from the FADER GROUPS directly to the various outputs

of your FireWire 410 you will need to set some things up in your VST Connections window…

Like this: Open VST Connections…

And you will see this – Make sure you have clicked on the OUTPUTS TAB!!!

Next, click on the ADD BUS button and add 3 Stereo buses.

Then click OK.

You will now see something like this…

Note that EACH pair of stereo outputs is assigned (in the device port column) to outputs 1-8

of MY Device. You should be able to achieve the SAME with your FireWire 410.

Finally, we need to set the OUTPUTS of our newly created GROUP tracks.

Open the mixer, locate the group channels we created earlier and set the outputs like this…

And this…

And this…

And so on.

If everything is set correctly, you will hear your groups out of the separate

pairs of outputs on the back of your FireWire 410.

NOTE: If you are ONLY monitoring the “MAIN” stereo out, you will NOT

hear anything routed to outputs 3-8 until you hook them up to your mixer.

We’ll start by creating a NEW Garage Band project, just to keep it simple.

Starting with a blank GB project, click on TRACK from the top menu area,

and from the dropdown, choose NEW TRACK.

Select “SOFTWARE INSTRUMENT” and click on “CREATE”. Below…

You will now have a new TRACK that automatically loads a Grand Piano. Below…

Next, on the right hand side of the screen, click on the “EDIT” tab. Below…

At the top of that window, you will see “Sound generator” and you

will see the word PIANO in a “bar”… Below…

Click on the word PIANO and a pop-up menu will appear… Below…

From this pop-up menu, choose EZdrummer from the list. Below…

EZdrummer will “load” but, you won’t “see” it until you click on

the new “Sound Generator” icon that replaces the “Piano Keys” icon. Below…

After clicking on the GENERIC Sound generator ICON, you will see EZdrummer… Below…

At this point, you will either see the window ABOVE OR you will see this… Below…

If you see the window above, you will need to AUTHORIZE EZdrummer.

For instructions on how to Authorize EZdrummer see this article…

http://www.toontrack.com/support_portal.asp?prod=EZdrummer%20and%20EZX%20expansions&issue=Authorization&os=Mac%20OS%2010.5.x&seq=Garageband

Once you are Authorized or if you are already Authorized, you can start using EZ drummer…

Click on the “OPEN GROOVES” button IN EZdrummer. Below…

And then you will see this (below)… Click on each category until you find what you want and then

Drag and Drop the “groove” you want.

… And it will look like this (below) after a “Drag and drop”.

Finally, let’s change that PIANO ICON to a DRUMMER ICON!

CLOSE the EZdrummer window (you can always bring it back by clicking on the EDIT TAB and then clicking on the GENERIC SOUND GENERATOR icon).

And we will be back here (below).

Now click on the PIANO ICON here… Below…

And you will see this pop-up selection of ICONS… Below…

Just click on the ICON of your choice (DRUMSET) and your new ICON will appear in your track.

(then change the name)

That’s it!

Toontrack support

Powered by Obedia

7-29-09 / FM

FOR PC:

From your “C: drive” OR install them (in the first place) on a drive OTHER than

your “C: drive”

If you have already installed EZdrummer or an EZX pack that you want to “MOVE”…

The first thing you have to do is UN-INSTALL EZdrummer or EZX sound packs using

the WINDOWS “Add or Remove Programs” utility in the WINDOWS Control Panel.

NOTE: You may UNINSTALL and REINSTALL EZdrummer or EZX packs on THE SAME COMPUTER

as many times as you like WITHOUT re-authorizing.

AUTH CODES and SERIAL NUMBERS can allways be viewed in your Toontrack account.

FROM THE TOP…

Q: I have a song where we recorded an acoustic guitar first then did the drum tracks later and so on. Before I recorded the drum tracks, I should have fixed the tempo problem first. Can I still fix this problem? (Even after using elastic audio to move some drum hits around?) I don’t work in grid mode or tick base settings for the most part. I know that this needs to change some day. Do you use beat detective?

A: OK, There’s 2 ways I can see going with this.

Way 1) Use Beat Detective to correct specific sections of the song, Say a bad fill for example Beat Detective is good with small sections. and is good for fixing a specific timing problem, but may still not work great if the tempo is all over the place or not defined for the entire song.

Way 2) Go the long way and create a tempo map of the entire song. Allowing you to use Elastic audio on any recorded tracks with more control over changing the actual tempo of the song. This is what I have been doing to fix parts because ultimately everything is much easier to edit in a grid mode once the tempo work is there. Also, Overdubbing new parts might be easier since you’ll be able to use a click track that will correspond to the tempo.

• Perform a SAVE AS at this point, so you can experiment without losing your current place. Creating the Tempo Map involves identifying bars and beats. Start by identifying bar 1. This could be tricky if you have any tracks set to Ticks. You may need to set them back to Samples before Identifying bar 1.
• Next identify Bar 2. This will set the Start tempo of the song. Now create a click track. This will help you by indicating when the tempo is changing and then go through the whole song identifying bars as you go whenever the click track gets off time. Each time you identify a bar, it will adjust the tempo map. Pic 1 shows where the Identify beat command is and also shows you my session, where I’ve gone through and done exactly that. Notice how the Tempo is identified, it’s all over the place. Kicks and snares are good places to identify beat. (Beat Detective can do this too, but I find it very tedious for an entire song)

• 
• Next, Change any Sample based tracks to tick based. Then pick the elastic type for ALL TRACKS - be sure your drum tracks are all grouped. Don’t leave any tracks out because they won’t be adjusted when you change tempo. Then I’ll mess around with the Tempo Operations window.
• In pic 2, I’m selecting 2 bars to apply a tempo change to.

This should go a long way to fixing any tempo issues. I don’t normally quantize things after all this, but often manually adjust or move warp markers using Grid mode. — Hope this helps.